[ih] How Plato Influenced the Internet

[Bob Purvy]

.. and indeed, I wrote a paper
<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580> about that.
Mark Lemley cited it in his *amicus* brief
<https://www.chamberlitigation.com/sites/default/files/scotus/files/Checkpoint%20Software%20et%20al%20Amici%20Brief%20--%20Alice%20Corp.%20v.%20CLS%20Bank%20International%20%28U.S.%20Supreme%20Court%29.pdf>
to SCOTUS. If you hate software patents, this is for you.

For a patent application to be "non-obvious" there usually has to be an
absence of references that suggest combining two or more technologies.
Because everything is obvious once you see it.

However, there's also the legal notion of "obvious to try" which means that
there are standard techniques that anyone skilled in the art would attempt.
My argument was that these obvious-to-try techniques exist in software (or
networking) and one should not be granted a patent for using them.

You can probably imagine that lawyers aren't thrilled with this notion.

On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 11:59 AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> On 8/23/2021 11:46 AM, Craig Partridge via Internet-history wrote:
> > If the available technology is limited (as it was in
> > the 1950s/60s/70s and early 1980s in many dimensions) then your solutions
> > to certain problems are going to look rather similar.
>
>
> That explains why ISDN looks so much like the TCP/IP?
>
>
> d/
>
> ps. yes, I should apologize.  no, I won't.
>
> --
> Dave Crocker
> Brandenburg InternetWorking
> bbiw.net
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>